Home » Use Mindfulness to Reset Your Autopilot [Telesummit Audio Recording]

Use Mindfulness to Reset Your Autopilot [Telesummit Audio Recording]

Use Mindfulness to Reset Your Autopilot [Telesummit Audio Recording]

This is the audio recording and transcript of a conversation with Laurie Dupar which originally aired as part of the Succeed with ADHD Telesummit. The presentation was titled Use Mindfulness to Reset Your Autopilot and Stop Crashing!


Length 40:17Presentation

 

 

LAURIE DUPAR Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the Annual Succeed with ADHD Telesummit. This is our seventh year sharing with you top notch ADHD information, and we are in full swing. We brought together 20 of the best ADHD experts, authors, coaches, psychologists, and educators to share the latest, most up-to-date ADHD information to help you learn more about ADHD and be successful whether you’re an adult, a parent, a student, a partner, or a professional. I’m Laurie Dupar from Coaching for ADHD and the International ADHD Coach Training Center.
LAURIE DUPAR Each call during the telesummit we’ll be featuring a different guest along with their unique topic. The calls will last for 30 minutes. So you have the chance to listen into multiple calls each day. Just to remind you, the calls are being recorded. So if you can’t listen live, you’ll have 24 hours to complimentary access to the replay of the recording. So if you’re already worried about missing out on one of the talks, be looking for an email from us that will tell you how to listen to the replay. And if you think you might miss a call entirely, another option for you is to use the upgrade to the ADHD Success Toolkit. For only $97, you’ll get expanded digital access to all the calls in the telesummit, so you can listen to them whenever you want.
LAURIE DUPAR And as a special bonus, when you purchase the ADHD Success Toolkit along with the full access to all the expert sessions and recordings, you’ll also get the speaker bonuses that the presenters are offering especially for Telesummit listeners who upgrade to the ADHD Success Toolkit. These additional bonuses include useful ADHD downloads, membership, template, ebook, audios, and even complimentary access to future webinars from the presenters of the Telesummit. To upgrade to the ADHD Success Toolkit, you can simply go to the Telesummit website at succeedwithadhdtelesummit.com. Go to the Telesummit website at succeedwithadhdtelesummit.com and follow the ADHD Success Toolkit link, or if it’s just easier for you, simply email us at support@succeedwithadhdtelesummit.com. That’s succeedwithadhdtelesummit.com or, excuse me, support@succeedwithadhdtelesummit.com and we’ll be happy to help you with that purchase.
LAURIE DUPAR So it’s my pleasure to introduce you to our guest for this next half hour, and I am not only thrilled to be able to introduce her as an expert on ADHD, but also really a wonderful person just in general. Let me introduce you to Casey Dixon. Casey Dixon is a life coach who focuses on science-based innovation, collaborative coaching for attorneys, or professors, and other demand-ridden professionals with ADHD. Casey is recognized as professional, board, and senior-certified ADHD coach. Her hallmark is reliably facilitating results without judgment. Casey is also the ADHD strategist for MindfullyADD, a website featuring short approachable mindfulness practices for people with ADHD. So it’s my pleasure to invite Casey Dixon to the call, and she’s going to be talking to us about Use Mindfulness to Reset Your Autopilot and Stop Crashing. What a great title. Hello, Casey, how are you doing?
CASEY DIXON Great. Thank you, Laurie. It’s fantastic to be part of the Telesummit again this year.
LAURIE DUPAR Oh, wonderful to have you here. I’m wondering, as we start into this, if you might share with the listeners sort of how you got into working with people with ADHD and mindfulness.
CASEY DIXON Well, a couple of years ago, mindfulness was really hot in the media [laughter]. And I’m sure everybody knows that. It started to show up as a means of alleviating stress, and chronic pain, and other health disorders. And at that time, there were some researchers doing some important work into how ADHD might be affected by a mindfulness practice. And the research – that I know you and I have talked about this in past sessions – has really piled up to say that mindfulness practice can help alleviate ADHD symptoms. And new meta-analysis, which means they gather all those research studies and pull them together and see what kind of patterns they find, are showing us that this continues to be the case and that

…mindfulness should be considered part of an effective treatment for ADHD.

LAURIE DUPAR Yeah. So that was when you became aware of it and really became interested in that and has continued to be something that’s really useful and actually recommended to be used with ADHD, the mindfulness. Yeah.
CASEY DIXON Well, and I also got into that because I was really listening to my clients. I mean, as coaches, that’s our primary function, right, is to actively listen to what we’re hearing. And so what I was hearing at the time is a lot of clients coming to me saying, “Hey, I’ve heard about this mindfulness thing, but I feel like I just can’t do that. It sounds too hard, too overwhelming, too confusing. What does it mean?” And that’s when I said, “Well, I can’t find any good resources for you that are ADHD specific either. So I’m going to make some.” And that’s where [laughter] MindfullyADD came from was really an answer to what my clients were looking for at the time.
LAURIE DUPAR Yeah. Well, I certainly think of you as sort of the reigning expert because of – like you said, “I’m going to create this because there’s nothing out there with regards to mindfulness.” And I know you and I have had conversations in the past about my own sort of unsureness about mindfulness and very much what your other clients said is like, “I don’t know if I can do this. It feels overwhelming. It feels tricky or something.” And you’ve really opened my eyes to that, and I’m excited for you to be talking about this a little bit more and sharing your perspective. It is about sort of taking this a step further to this autopilot piece. What do you mean by this term, autopilot?
CASEY DIXON Well, last year during the Telesummit, we talked about four steps to mindfulness. And one of the steps was to develop an autopilot, which really means developing an automatic system for creating the mindfulness habit. So I was saying, “Use autopilot to help you create the mindfulness habit.” Today I’m going to sort of switch that around in the other direction and talk a little bit about how developing a mindfulness habit can help you to develop autopilot that’s self-supportive in other areas of your life. So we’re going to try to use mindfulness to reset our autopilot to keep us from crashing and be more self-supportive across the board.
LAURIE DUPAR Okay. I wonder as you’re– oh, go ahead. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.
CASEY DIXON Well, I was just going to say, people say, “What do you mean by autopilot?” Yeah. There are several different ways of answering that question. And, typically, when a client calls me, they blame everything bad on their autopilot. So my friend Barb ran her laundry without putting in her detergent. And she said in a really self-disparaging manner, “I was running on autopilot.” And what she’s really talking about there is she’s equating autopilot to sort of not paying attention or mind-wandering. So she’s in the middle of her laundry sequence, put the clothes in, turn the water on, make sure you have your detergent somewhere in there, and she just lost her sequence because she wasn’t paying attention to the moment. So autopilot is often equated with this sort of negative mind-wandering. But I’m going to sort of tweak that a little bit. And I asked her, “Okay, so your pilot was asleep at the controls. And you’ve switched on your autopilot. But if your autopilot had been really well-programmed in the first place, then you probably wouldn’t have forgotten to put some detergent in the laundry.” So it’s the fact that she didn’t have her I’m-going-to-do-laundry sequence, or routine, or system really well-developed that kind of got in the way and got her to run laundry with no detergent.
CASEY DIXON And running laundry with no detergent does not sound like a big deal, right? You just re-run it with some detergent. But for a lot of my clients – and I think this is true for many adults who have ADHD – it’s when you do those little things that other people call careless mistakes, they pile up and can be really, really harmful to your self-image and your internal sort of voice about yourself. So when Barb told me, “I ran the laundry without the detergent,” this was not a small deal to her. This was more proof that she was incapable of doing things that seemed easy for other people. So I think it’s really important for us to look at autopilot as a means of doing tasks without necessarily needing a lot of conscious thought. So, typically, that means you’re doing things with the help of a well-programmed routine. So you’re doing the same thing, in the same way, every time you do it. So it’s well-rehearsed.
LAURIE DUPAR Yeah. And that’s very normal for us to develop is– for people to develop is this autopilot where there are things that are done habitually. And because to be conscious of it all, all at the same time is really impossible for us to do. And if I understand it right, what you’re saying is that we can– that sometimes that routine or that autopilot may have not been set thoroughly, or the way we wanted, or something, or consciously, I don’t know, so that it actually works. We might not have set it right the first time. Or set it and forgot it, or forgot it. Is that what I’m understanding Casey?
CASEY DIXON Yeah, absolutely.

And I think there’s a tendency for a lot of my clients at least, or adults with ADHD, to sort of make a lot of decisions that aren’t necessary to make. And I call this “reinventing the wheel” when it comes to doing really mundane things.

So when Barb walked into her laundry room, she was trying to– she was sort of new to doing laundry. She didn’t have a well-established routine. So she’s reinventing that wheel every time she goes to do the laundry. And making decisions in the moment that can cause a lot of cognitive energy like when do I put the detergent in? If she can’t answer that question clearly, then her autopilot is not programmed well [laughter].

LAURIE DUPAR Yes. I love the terms that you come up with because they’re so clear. The whole thing about the autopilot, and you may not have programmed it right. Our program’s not right, but thoroughly in the first place, and reinventing the wheel takes so much mental energy. And it’s so accurate to what’s happening. And if we’d have to do that each and every time, that mental energy, we can’t be using some place else.
CASEY DIXON That’s right. That’s exactly it. Yup.
LAURIE DUPAR Yeah. Yeah. So I totally think we get sort of this autopilot thing. It’s a great concept. I love that. And you talked a little bit about your friend, Barb. I’m wondering if there’s some other [laughter] – poor Barb – if there are some other examples you can share about sort of what is a good and bad autopilot look like for people with ADHD?
CASEY DIXON Absolutely. Yeah. And I’m going to start in sort of a non-coaching way. Let’s start with the bad. So when I say bad autopilot, what I really mean is that the habit or the action that you’re taking is not self-supportive. So you have an intention to do the laundry, but you forget to put in the detergent. That’s not a self-supportive habit. So if we move away from laundry and look at a really typical scenario for many of my clients with ADHD would be the morning routine problem. I have a client, and we’ll call him Sam. So Sam does not have a good autopilot program for how he gets up and gets out of the house in the morning. He has one that, like we just mentioned, really requires him to make tons of decisions in the moment and reinvent the wheel every morning. And, of course, the morning routine, as you know, starts with the evening routine. So he already sabotages his morning routine by negotiating with himself every night what time to set his alarm. And this is really typical if I ask an adult with ADHD who’s looking into managing their morning routine or, “Well, what time do you set your alarm for?” I often get this blank look like, “Well, it depends [laughter]. It depends on the morning. It depends how much sleep I need. It depends how late I stayed up. It depends how much I can skip or do in the morning.” And I think that’s the start of the problem. So he’s negotiating that, which cost a lot of emotional and cognitive energy. And then when the alarm goes off, Sam is hitting the snooze button, and meanwhile while he’s doing that, he’s got his negotiating in his mind about what time he really has to get up. You know, “Can I snooze one more time?” And then once he does get up, he’s trying to decide, “Do I have time to shave today?” or “Should I skip that and do that tomorrow?” And then there’s finding clothes. “What should I wear? Are they clean? Are they pressed? Where is that shirt that I want to wear with these pants?” And then there’s, “Should I eat breakfast? Am I hungry? What is there in the house to eat?”
CASEY DIXON And Sam doesn’t even have kids [laughter]. He’s just trying to get himself out of the house. And if you add in other family members, all of this is exponentially harder and more decisions are being made. And Sam is renegotiating, “What time do I have to actually leave? Is there going to be time for one more thing? Can I take three minutes to check my email? What do the traffic and weather look like? What time do I actually need to be in the car?” So by the time Sam hits the car and is ready for his commute, he’s already emotionally and cognitively exhausted. And none of those decisions that he’s sort of inadvertently wasted his cognitive energy on are really worthy of his energy. These are really mundane things that he does every single day. But he does not have his autopilot sort of structured for morning routine. And I think your point is absolutely critical here in that, but he arrives at work exhausted so he doesn’t have energy for more worthy choices, and creative endeavors, and projects that he should be really focusing on at work. So other examples of that, it’s just thinking you’re really small and I’m doing something mindlessly. I had a client who was 15 minutes late for his appointment with me, and he called and he said, “I lost my car [laughter].” The first thought I had was, “Oh my goodness. Is it stolen? What’s going on?” And he said, “No. I just parked it somewhere and I can’t remember where.” And that’s the sort of mind wandering mindless version of this. But not paying attention to really basic life, day-to-day boring things like, “Oh, I got to park my car. I got to get up and brush my teeth. I have to eat breakfast.” That’s where these things can really get in the way of living well with adult ADHD.
LAURIE DUPAR Yeah. I know one of them. I suppose an example that I see a lot is people not having an autopilot program, I guess, for taking medication, right?
 CASEY DIXON  Yeah, absolutely. “Did you take your medication today?” “I’m not sure.” I mean, that’s a really common thing that I hear because they don’t have a good system in place. I’m really glad you brought that up. And again, it’s the mundane stuff. The stuff you have to do every day. Take your medication. Arriving at the office is another really big pitfall for a lot of my clients. What’s the first thing that you do when you arrive at your office? And because most of my clients don’t start their coaching program with a good autopilot system for what to do when they arrive at the office, they go to the default which is: check my email. So they sit down, check their email, and now their day is being run and dictated by their email inbox rather than by any kind of daily plan that they’ve established for themselves. So that’s another area that can be really problematic.
LAURIE DUPAR Yeah. I think it’s almost like when we have them set an autopilot system or program for a soldier on certain areas, we’re sort of at the mercy of whatever happens, which is chaos. It can be chaos.
CASEY DIXON I think that’s–
LAURIE DUPAR Or not getting done what we want to get done.
CASEY DIXON –really, really important. And autopilot also can be inner automaticity. So not just these sort of tasks and mundane things that we do, but things that we think. So in the mindfulness, if you’re reading books or articles about mindfulness, you might hear the term “narrative voice.”

A narrative voice really means stories that we tell ourselves, right? So in our automatic pilot could say, “Hey, you know what? You’ve never been able to plan your day before. What makes you think you could do it today?” Or, “I should have really eaten breakfast, and now I’m running on empty, and I feel terrible. Why don’t I just eat breakfast in the morning?” So these are stories that a lot of adults with ADHD run over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again in their minds that are really not self-supportive.

LAURIE DUPAR Yes, right? Yeah. And the thing is is that it’s almost like we’re trying to do the thing that we want to do. But I love that you bring in this part of the inner autopilot. That we can’t ignore some times the way we can get off track with our own thoughts if we’re not paying attention to it.
CASEY DIXON Right. And that’s where the creating systems– and these can be externalized systems. So if you hear yourself saying, “Well, I simply can’t get out of the house on time.” Then we need to sort of counter act that by saying, “What can you do to stop that narrative voice? Because it’s not a self-supportive narrative voice.” And for many people, that means writing down ways that they can get out of the house in the morning. Or saying, “That might have been true, but it’s not always going to be true [laughter].” Those kinds of things can be really, really effective in shutting down that inner autopilot that is not self-supportive.
LAURIE DUPAR So that’s kind of the bad [laughter]. Yeah. Rewriting that program. Absolutely. Yeah, those are a way to really do affect the day to day. Yeah. And the good, what’s the good?
CASEY DIXON Well, the good, a lot of us do good autopilot stuff already. And this is another area that I speak with it’s– I’m running a group coaching program workshop right now, and it’s a six-week program. And I ask my clients in there, “What kind of habits do you have that are self-supportive?” And [laughter], again, I get a lot of blank looks. “Well, I’m terrible at all habits. And I don’t have any good routines established yet.” But then if we keep kind of poking around, we will find some things that they are already doing in an automatic way that are really self-supportive. So for many, many people, there are two categories of this. One is this really mundane task thing again. So I get up every morning and I brush my teeth. So that’s a task that most of us, not all of us, automatically do when we get up in the morning. And we have an autopilot program for that. So after loading the toothbrush, we put it in our mouth and start scrubbing away. We really follow the same path each time. And we’ve done this activity so many times that it’s overlearned and requires extremely little cognitive or emotional energy. And I ask my clients sometimes, I’m like, “What if brushing your teeth didn’t happen with this sort of elegant automaticity? What if you went to brush your teeth one morning and you couldn’t remember how? Like you were a little kid and you were learning how to do it for the first time. You would have to make all sorts of decisions. ‘Where do I put it into my mouth? How much toothpaste do I use [laughter]? Which hand do I use? Do I start on the bottom or the top, [laughter] or the left or the right, or the inside or the outside? And how do I know when I’m finished brushing my teeth [laughter]?'” Right?–
LAURIE DUPAR “When do I spit [laughter]?”
CASEY DIXON “When do I spit? Do I rinse? Do I not rinse?”–
LAURIE DUPAR “So do I gargle?”–
CASEY DIXON And I know this sounds – right? It sounds sort of silly. But this is, to me, a good analogy for this reinventing the wheel habit that a lot of my clients are inadvertently doing when they’re trying to get through their day. Think about how exhausting that would be if you had to relearn brushing your teeth every morning. It’s a very similar type of scenario. So people have a lot of good habits like that. One that’s often mentioned is driving your car. Once you’ve learned how to do that and over learned it, you typically don’t have to think very hard about how to go about driving a car, which allows you to think, and listen to the radio, and talk to your passenger while you’re doing it. It’s very cognitively low impact. And the more advanced level of good autopilot would be things like I have a great system when I do check my email. I automatically file things here. I automatically delete these things, and I automatically move these things into my to-do list. Filing papers or doing an intentional morning planning routine. And again, some of my clients have great evening or bedtime routines because they’ve worked with a coach or they’ve struggled with sleep, and they’ve come up with something that works for them. So I think we need to sort of look at, what are we doing, and can we use those really good autopilot routines as examples of how we can implement those in other areas of our lives where it’s falling apart.
LAURIE DUPAR Yeah. You mentioned and I still appreciate that you’re using your clients– the people that you’ve worked with really specific experiences. And I have no doubt, Casey, that this applies to probably almost everybody in some way that’s listening to the call. I find myself listening to this and thinking, “Yeah, if I didn’t have an autopilot for brushing my teeth, I’d be exhausted.” By the end, I did that. And how much energy that takes away from– to be able to have to think about that. Well, we reinvent the wheel, like you said, every day. And I know this applies to all of us trying to really make the most of our mental cognitive energy that we have during the day. It’s just so clear how certain kinds of habits we may not even realize can interfere with or can just drain us from the other things that we want to actually spend or pay attention to.
CASEY DIXON Yeah. And a funny example of that is the– I don’t know, but there’s a lot of Facebook or Twitter posts going around with powerful CEOs or organizers saying, “Okay, I wear the same thing every day. I get up. I put my t-shirt on and my jeans and I go to work, and/or I wear basically the same outfit. I have three versions of it, and I just switch back and forth.” And what they’re really talking about there is saving that cognitive energy for something that’s more important.
LAURIE DUPAR Yeah. More important for them. They’ve been able to sort of look at and say, “Hey, it’s not important. I don’t want to have to spend a lot of time thinking about this. And I want to be able to have that energy for something else.” And I hear that a lot. I’m sure you do to that when we have spent so much mental energy on something– I mean, literally, I think we think about our bodies sort of physically fatiguing after working out or doing a lot of physical work that we forget that our mind is similar to that, right? We can literally wear ourselves out before we can get started in the day.
CASEY DIXON Yeah. And I think this is particularly important for people who have ADHD because Russell Barkley tells us – and the research backs him up on this – that people with ADHD will metabolize more cognitive energy doing the same task as somebody without ADHD. So we need to really preserve that cognitive fuel as much as possible throughout the day.
LAURIE DUPAR Yeah. So how can mindfulness help with them? Wondering if that’s a good direction to go to.
CASEY DIXON Yeah. I think that’s a really important question. And one is that mindfulness can help us because it asks us to be more capable of noticing the present moment. It asks us to be more able to direct our own attention in the moment and make intentional choices. And so it really helps to say, “Okay, if I’m able to notice, and be self-aware, and make some choices, and kind of put myself back in the pilot’s chair for a minute, then it’s easier to understand, “Okay, what autopilot systems am I using that are not self-supportive? Is there some bad autopilot that I can find in my life that I can either delete, or reprogram, or reset?” So it increases that awareness and the noticing. And I think, also, allows us to ask ourselves in the moment, “Is there something that’s getting in my way that I can create and program some autopilot for?” And it helps us to kind of be more in that moment.

So the narrative voice gets replaced with what’s called the experiential voice for that inner autopilot so that narrative voice might be saying, “Okay, you’ve tried to plan in the past and that’s never worked. So why bother?” And the experiential voice might say, “When I sit down in the morning and think about planning, I feel a little uncomfortable.” Feeling a little uncomfortable is much more manageable than, “I will never be able to do that.” And so this is that experiential voice has a lot more of power to make positive changes than the narrative voice does.

CASEY DIXON And that mindfulness really, really helps to develop that ability. It asks us to sort of check in on how we feel. And that could be as simple as how do my feet feel right now on the floor? Are they warm? Are they cold? Are they tingling? Are they numb, or do they feel heavy? So what we’re doing during that kind of mindfulness practice is learning how to intentionally direct our attention and our focus on something in our bodies. That same skill can then be used to focus our attention on our habits, and our routines, and our autopilot programs.

So that’s kind of how mindfulness will help us to say, “Am I making decisions on unworthy choices? Can I reset my autopilot so that I’m not crashing from exhaustion by the time I arrive at the office?”

LAURIE DUPAR Yeah, right? I’m wondering. I have a question sort of as we do this, and I’m wondering if– because I’m thinking, “Okay, how long does it take to reset this autopilot?” So I’m really hearing that the skill of mindfulness helps us to be aware, perhaps, where our autopilots are serving us when they’re not serving us. And then I’m hearing, right, we need to sort of rewrite it or we re-examine it, and set the autopilot, and create an autopilot that actually works for us. I’m wondering is there different lengths of time it takes to redo the autopilot? I’m just thinking that somebody listening, I know, has that question right now too.
CASEY DIXON Yeah. And I think that’s a really important question because once you’ve realized that you have a negative autopilot or you need to rewrite your autopilot, that’s when it helps to– you can do this on your own, but it often really helps to work with a coach to say, “All right. What could that system look like if your morning routine wasn’t forcing you to make all those choices and decisions?” People can do that for themselves by asking very specific questions like, “Well, okay, if I was going to be at work on time and not be exhausted, what would my morning look like? Let me script it out and reprogram it.” And neurologically speaking, what happens is that when we’re making those choices and plans, we’re really using our prefrontal cortex and executive functions, and that’s harder when you have ADHD, right? But if you start to repeat a positive autopilot system, even within three or four repetitions, you’re starting to process that deeper in your brain in what’s called the basal ganglia. So that’s where we do things that are automatic like breathing and digesting, but also little less subconscious like driving a car or brushing our teeth.

So what we want to do is keep repeating, and repeating, and repeating, and repeating until that stuff has moved out of the high-cost energy zone of our brain and into the low-cost energy zone of our brain.

Depending on how complex the system is and the individual, I don’t know how many repetitions you’ll need. So I always call it– just recommending people to overlearn it.

LAURIE DUPAR Okay. Overlearn it–
CASEY DIXON Use all the tactics that you can until you’ve overlearned it, and then you don’t need any more support and it becomes automatic.
LAURIE DUPAR Right. And it goes to that place of that automatic pilot system that works for you?
CASEY DIXON Yup.
LAURIE DUPAR Yeah. And if it’s not working, and the mindfulness is part where you actually check in with yourself is what I’m hearing to say, “Okay, is this working for me or not?” And then you can course-correct, so to speak.
CASEY DIXON

Yup. So that, specifically, mindfulness will help you to go in and examine and notice, and question without judgment what you’re experiencing and what you can create for yourself.

LAURIE DUPAR I was going to say I love those non-judgment part. Remember that.
CASEY DIXON Yeah. That’s the point. That’s the key right there. Because if you’re judging and you’re saying, “Well, my autopilot stinks,” then that’s just not self-supportive. But then, in addition to helping you notice, and recreate, and reset your autopilot, mindfulness, in general, will reduce your ADHD symptoms if you practice it frequently enough so that you’re not as tempted to fall back on these unself-supportive sort of reinventing-the-wheel patterns.
LAURIE DUPAR Got it. Got it. Well, Casey, I’m just noticing the time here. And the information you bring is always so enlightening, to me especially. And I’m sure for everybody else. So I so appreciate you not only bringing the mindfulness back to the Telesummit, but also that next step in bringing this other piece about this autopilot, and great stuff. And I so appreciate you coming. Thank you so much. Anything that you want to share with the listeners before we wrap up because there’s a couple of more things I want to make sure that you do share with them. But any last-minute comments about the mindfulness, and this autopilot, and to keep it from crashing?
CASEY DIXON Yeah. I think that people just sort of– the tidbit takeaway would be that autopilot can be viewed as both a friend and an enemy to ADHD. It’s not just always in the enemy camp.

So I think using your mindfulness practice to help you notice and question your automatic routines can help you to really create a friendly autopilot. And then it can be so powerful it will change the way you experience your day-to-day living well with ADHD.

LAURIE DUPAR Wow. Wonderful. That’s terrific. I am actually going to try this. So [laughter] I can tell you I’m already got– I’m already thinking I can reprogram some of my autopilot. Before we wrap up here Casey, would you just share with people, you have a wonderful bonus gift that you’ve included in our ADHD success kit that people can get when they do the upgrade. Can you tell them a little bit about that?
CASEY DIXON Sure. I’m the ADHD strategist for MindfullyADD which we talked about at the beginning of the recording. And MindfullyADD is a membership website for people with ADHD who want to develop and keep on with the mindfulness practice. And right now, we have about 50 mindfulness practices that are guided, short meditations. They are based on the ADHD research. I call it ADHD informed mindfulness practices and fall into sort of ADHD needs like Settle Down, or Get Moving, Just Move, or Focus. They’re really, really short, and in addition to the practices, there are over 30 articles. Some how to’s. Some e-books, and presentations, and reviews of research which might sound pretty dull to some people, but I do have a lot of people who love those to just keep inspired for that. But the bonus gift is a free 30-day membership to MindfullyADD. You just have to go and sign up. You will not be charged, and then your membership will expire at the end of the 30-day period. So if you want to continue with MindfullyADD, then you would just have to rejoin after your membership expires–
LAURIE DUPAR Wonderful. I love that. Giving people a whole month to sort of experience this and the mindfulness approach. So thank you so much for that bonus gift. And I know people are going to want to have a way to contact you. The website certainly has that contact information as well, but what’s one place that would be the best for them to reach you at, Casey?
CASEY DIXON Well, I think my coaching website is the best starting point. So that is dixonlifecoaching.com. There you’ll find articles, and resource page, and information about my group coaching program. And there’s also a link to MindfullyADD from that website, and a contact page, of course. So it’s kind of everything [laughter]. It’s right there.
LAURIE DUPAR Great. Great. Yeah. So Dixon Life Coaching to connect with Casey. And Casey, as we wrap up here, I just want to thank you again for coming and being on the Telesummit sharing such great information. And, understandably, I always love the way that you package things or put things together. It’s just very user-friendly. So thank you for coming so much.
CASEY DIXON Thank you. Yeah.
LAURIE DUPAR Yeah. And thank you, listeners, for joining us for this particular session. I know you can spend your time doing all sorts of things, and I am very honored that you choose to spend it with us. So you know there’s more coming. Please stay tuned. And once again, I just want to say thank you to Casey for being such a great resource for us here in the ADHD community. And I want to wish you all well until I hear you on the next call. So talk to you later. Thank you, again, Casey. Bye-bye, everyone.

 

For more on Mindfulness and Automaticity, read here.

 

Leave a Reply